Cyber goggles serve see-food diet

Tokyo University professor Michitaka Hirose (R) and his team developed a camera-equipped special goggle, which makes cookies bigger to help users' diet at his laboratory in Tokyo on June 2, 2012. Hirose conducted an experiment, asking examinees to eat as many cookies as they want with and without the glasses. The results showed they ate 9.3 percent less on average with the goggle showing cookies 1.5 times bigger than they actually are and ate 15 percent more with cookies looking two-thirds of their real size. AFP PHOTO / Yoshikazu TSUNOSource:AFP

They also make biscuits appear larger than they are, offering hope to weak-willed dieters everywhere.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed devices that use computer wizardry and augmented reality to fool the senses and make users feel more satisfied with smaller - or less appealing - treats.

On one device goggle-mounted cameras send images to a computer, which magnifies the apparent size of the biscuit in the image it displays to the wearer while keeping his hand the same size, making the snack appear larger than it actually is.

In experiments, volunteers consumed nearly 10 per cent less when the biscuits they were eating appeared 50 per cent bigger.

They ate 15 per cent more when biscuits were manipulated to look two-thirds of their real size.

Professor Michitaka Hirose at the university's graduate school of information science and technology said he was interested in how computers can be used to trick the human mind.

"How to fool various senses or how to build on them using computers is very important in the study of virtual reality," he said.

Prof Hirose said standard virtual reality equipment that attempts to cater to complex senses like touch often results in bulky equipment.

But he said using one or more senses to fool the others was a way around this problem.

"Reality is in your mind," he said.

In another project, Prof Hirose's team developed a "meta biscuit", where the headgear uses scent bottles and visual trickery to fool the wearer into thinking the snack they are eating is anything but a plain biscuit.

Users can set the device to their favourite taste so they think they are eating a chocolate or strawberry-flavoured biscuit.